Temple from 1000 BC found on Greek island

Press, 9 February 1982, Page 17

Temple from 1000 BC found on Greek island

By

“Observer”

correspondent in Athens.

A joint Greek-British archaeological team has unearthed what may be the earliest known Greek temple, in a field on Euboea, the narrow island off the coast of Attica.

The ancient building overlooking the sea at Toumba, near the village of Lefkandi, bears little resemblance to the marble masterpieces of Athens in the Fifth Century BC.

It seems to have been a long hut, rounded at one end to form an apse, built of mud bricks on stone foundations and with a thatched roof. It was surrounded by a peristyle — the outer lines of columns which give a Greek temple its distinctive appearance — of rectangular wooden timbers rather than marble pillars. Beneath its floor were two burial pits, their contents suggesting a dark tale of ritual murder or perhaps suicide by a concubine or wife at her warrior husband’s funeral. According to Mrs Evi Touloupa of the Greek Archaeological Service, who directed the dig with Mervyn popham and Hugh Sackett of the British School at Athens, ♦he building dates from about 1000 BC. ' “This is more than two centuries earlier than the first temples we know. It’s a tremendously important site for the history of Greek architecture and religion.” she S3VS- s Yet the site, now under the cuoervision of the Euboea Antiquities Department, nar-'‘-'rnwiv escaped destruction 18 months ago. The tempie rez mAins ' Vllh walls surviving more than 3ft high, came n light when a bulldozer illegally began levelling the

ground for a summer villa. In recent years affluence and tourism have brought a, building boom along every coast within easy reach of Athens.

The bulldozer swept away a third of the 115 ft-long building, cutting away one side of the shafts which held the burials., but not disturbing them. One contained a large bronze urn. its mouth closed by a bronze bowl. Inside were cremated bones, wrapped in linen. Beside the urn were the dead man’s iron sword and spear, and nearby there was the skeleton of a young woman lying on her back next to an ivory-handled iron knife.

The woman — aged between 25 and 30 on dental evidence — was buried in all her finery. Two gold discs linked by a pectoral formed what the archaeologists called “a golden brassiere." Gold hair ornaments lay beside the skull, and a cluster of bronze and iron pins, some sheathed in gold, lay beside her left thigh. The warrior’s corpse had ' been ceremonially burnt on a funeral pyre and the remains enclosed carefully in a vessel that may have been a family heirloom before the community raised the shrine to honour his memory. Not long afterwards ■ the building was destroyed and covered with a mound of earth and stones. Mr Pop.ham. a lecturer in Aegean archaeology at Oxford University, suggested that things had gone wrong soon after the hero’s burial. Part of the rounded end of the building appears to have collapsed, perhaps because it had been constructed over an earlier Bronze Age chamber tomb.